How to promote travel blog

Travel is a big industry! Let’s face it – keeping traffic up on a blog focused on travel is no small feat. With so many other big-business travel blogs aiming to usurp the other, how is the newly developed blogger supposed to climb to the top without taking years or even months to get there?

There are strategies that these blogs and websites use that you can begin to implement as well. Although most of the strategies outlined below are free, many also cost a bit of money. If you really want to compete in the market, the old saying is always a true one – “If you want to make money, you need to spend it!” If you don’t mind starting out a bit slower, focus on the free strategies first, then once you have base and are somewhat profitable, move onto the ones that require financial backing. Most importantly, stay focused and work at it every day – it’s not easy but it is possible!

SEO

Ohh that magical word that brings so many thoughts to a bloggers mind – SEO! It can be frustrating and downright silly sometimes, but it is necessary if you want people to actually find your blog. But don’t worry too much – gone are the days when you had to overload your articles with silly keywords that didn’t fit right into any sentences. Search engine crawlers are now smarter and able to distinguish the spammy content from the good stuff, so if you use these strategies you can’t go wrong!

Learn your keywords: Using a free keyword planning tool, such as Google Keywords can help you see what keywords would best suit your blog and audience. These free tools work by suggesting keywords based on searches related to your product. This can help you immensely by using these words in your article, as well as tags when tagging your page.

Dont Overcrowd New web crawlers for search engines no longer use the same general keyword searches that they used to. They’re now built smarter and made to be more intuitive. SO when adding keywords to your pages, stick to just a few per article

Be Smart Choosing general keywords like ‘travel’ or ‘vacation’ will never put you with your target audience. While these words should definitely be displayed on your homepage, they shouldn’t be used in each and every article on purpose. Pay attention to keywords that will target the exact audience you want. For example, if you’re trying to blog about luxury travel, then be sure to use keywords related to that. If you want to get people talking about travelling to India, then use keywords that relate to that audience.

Know your audience! Be sure you know who exactly you are targeting also. For example, if you want to sell trips or get people talking about New York nightlife, then your target would most likely be people under 40. Get to know what your audience likes and what they want to see online.

Social Media

Social media has become one of the biggest advertising weapons on the web. But as social media has grown, the people running the show have changed a lot to keep the little guy from reaching the top. While Facebook feeds used to display every post made to every subscriber, they now show just a few people, giving more attention to the big companies that can pay big bucks for advertising or ‘boosting’ their posts. Twitter is a fast-paced machine pumping out a new tweet every few seconds to every subscriber. Trying to make your mark there seems more difficult now too since many companies offer sponsored tweets. Then there’s Instagram – while they have managed to steer clear of the mayhem so far, it’s not always so simple to have your pictures lead to your site. So what to do? There are some strategies you can use for each of these – as well as other social media outlets – to get your site noticed.

Facebook

Viral Content: The stuff that gets shown the most on Facebook that isn’t paid for is the viral videos and memes. But sharing what other people have made will never get hits to your site, so when it comes to Facebook you have to really put in some elbow grease! Whether you want to hire someone to make these posts for you, or figure them out yourself is up to you. Find out what’s trending on Facebook – there are a plethora of Facebook pages dedicated to this – and come up with your own trends. For example, if cute animals are trending (which they often are!) get a meme or short video going of a travel-related cute animal story or joke.

Shares: Getting people to share your content vastly improves how many people will see it. Besides just making something that people will want to share, try to have a few promotions going all the time. It can be as small as sharing and commenting on a post and winning a $1 Amazon code, but these things work! You could use some travel trivia questions related to your post that day (linking your post inside) and promote it that way. Be creative! Make what you would want to share!

Twitter

Hashtag: There’s a reason so many people say “hashtag” when talking about a subject – that’s because they want to get it trending. And guess what – it works! Besides paying attention to popular hashtags on twitter and using them to your advantage, try making your own creative hashtags. Getting a few people you know to retweet them can get the trend going and make it big!

Tag! Tagging others in your tweets can get spammy if you do it too much, but if you’re writing about a specific location, why not tag the official travel page on twitter for that location. Or use it as a hashtag. These companies have people go through all these social media tags everyday and retweet or share them. This turns into a bunch of traffic for you!

Press Releases

There’s a reason big companies use press releases – they work! By having a properly written press release published, you can use it yourself for PR, or contact PR companies who would be willing to help you get it out there. There are 2 ways you can draft a press release:

Do-It-Yourself: If you’d like to write a press release on your own, then you need to educate yourself about how to do so. There is a great tutorial on Wikipedia (as well as other sites) for this, showing you the correct format and wording to use. Take it slow, and work at it hard. Ask other people to read it and tell you what they think. Make it interesting – it should catch the attention of readers like a newspaper headline would.

Hire: Hiring someone to write a press release doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. You need to figure out exactly what you want the press release to say, and what should be included in it. Links, contact info, references – include everything you need to and give this information to your writer. Finding a writer isn’t difficult if you use trustworthy freelancing sites as Freelancer, oDesk, or PeoplePerHour.

The next step with a press release is to get it out there. There are also 2 ways to go about this You could choose one, or do both!

DIY: Going at it alone is very time consuming, but if you can’t afford to pay a PR company, then it`s worth it. Start out small. Contact other blogs that are related to travel and see if they would be interested in posting your release, or a snippet of it. You can make it more enticing by adding graphics, free recipes, or infographics. Bloggers will be much more likely to post these. Or you can offer to write a small introductory paragraph for them made just for their blog.

PR Company: Hiring a PR company or agent can cost more, but it can be worth it. They have access to tons of contacts that you need. Look for a company that specializes in your field and contact them to find out rates, or work out a special price.

Software: PR software is what PR agents use to find great people to give the content to. Sites like Cision offer this software for a premium, but it is worth it if you plan to use it yourself. Learn all you can about using it, and the best software to use for your industry, and implement it.

Promoting your travel site or blog doesn’t have to be rocket science. But it does take time and sometimes money to get to the top. Expect to take at least 3 months before we see the big results you want to see using the above strategies. If you`re dedicated everyday (yes even on weekends! The internet doesn’t sleep!) It is possible to compete with the big boys and have a successful site.